FEATURE : INNOVATION
Building software products
While a company like Pure Storage is continuously innovating on its hardware offering , how are they able to manage the software side of the development , to work in parallel ?
“ I do not think it is any more of a challenge than it has been . Software has always been the greatest challenge . Getting it right , getting it robust , getting it flexible , and getting it to work across all the environments , has always been the greatest challenge ,” explains Colgrove .
“ The best thing about Pure Storage ’ s products is the marriage of the hardware and the software . You can have the best hardware in the world and if you do not have good software , you do not have anything .”
“ You need to give direction and you need to give inspiration when building software products . We have a new product area that we are working on called Pure Fusion . It is designed to let you run a whole group of Pure products as a cloud service . Purity is our software operating system that runs on the products and this is a new interface to Purity ,” he adds .
“ The best way forward for this , is to have one interface to the customer that fits all , but the backend is tailored to each one ,” says Colgrove .
If a customer is using a cloud and on-premises application , why do they want to operate it in different ways ? Do they really want to learn two different ways of doing it ? So having one way to operate them is the right answer because it is the right answer for the customer .
When a customer buys a Pure Storage array , it is quite simple and easy to use . When a customer buys two arrays , you sort of do things twice . When you buy 20 + arrays , you start having to do things many more times to run it and you also want to provision new storage .
This raises more questions like how to provision workloads , class of services , class of performance , cost effective storage , data replication , backup and ransomware protection , downtime , active clustering and so on .
Having the backend make the best utilisation of the resources is then the other right answer for the customer . But you want to hide all this from the customer . The customer does not care how the phone makes the best call ; they just care that it makes the best call .
“ You do not want to show those differences to the customer , which is the essence of simplicity because the customer does not want to learn all about that ,” advises Colgrove . p
Fusion is a new interface layer that is designed to run FlashArrays or FlashBlades or a mix of both like a cloud service . Now in a cloud service , you do not specify which machine something needs to runs on , you just indicate the performance and service levels . Fusion runs all the workloads on the flash arrays under an API .
“ This is a simpler and easier way to interact with a fleet ,” explains Colgrove .
Digital choice of customers
The availability of multiple digital platforms for enterprises to adopt and migrate to has become a key requirement for modern day transformation . How is Pure Storage able to map these requirements into its product strategy ?
SO WHO IS THE ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVING THE
QUALITY OF THE PRODUCT , IMPROVING THE
RESILIENCY , IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE , AND
MAKING IT EASIER FOR ENGINEERS TO DO
THEIR WORK ?
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